Any essential Indesign features that Affinity Publisher lacks?

[walt.farrell]

Just now, cbordey said:

when applying character or paragraph styles to imported text, it overrides formatting of the imported text such as italicized and bolded words/sentences. The workaround is to search and replace the imported text for all instances of italicized and bolded instances and set them to an italicized/bolded character style first. Very tedious. And though I did that for a recent 360 page project, I missed a few things that should have been italicized.  

Doesn't one of these handle that for you?

That's the context menu when you right-click on a Text Style name in the Text Styles panel.

[cbordey]

Thanks for the tip Walt. My concern is that choosing preserve character formatting vs preserve local formatting will not preserve everything that needs to be preserved. Seems like I’d have to experiment with that. I’d be willing to try that for a smaller project.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, cbordey said:

Thanks for the tip Walt. My concern is that choosing preserve character formatting vs preserve local formatting will not preserve everything that needs to be preserved. Seems like I’d have to experiment with that. I’d be willing to try that for a smaller project.

Experimenting with sample documents is often advisable, and useful.

In this case, it might help to also check the Help. In particular, this section addresses the processing that occurs with "Apply <x> and Preserve <some kind of> formatting". If it's right, the distinction between "preserve local" and "preserve character" formatting is relatively minor, though important.

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/pages/Text/textStyles.html

 

[cbordey]

Thanks for the link to the Help. I think preserve character formatting will work for my book projects. And it seems that you can set this behavior by default. That would make things way easier! I really didn't want to revert back to Indesign. So long as this works I think I will continue with Publisher. Thanks for saving me some money!

 

[cbordey]

I tried it just now and applying paragraph styles while preserving character formatting keeps the imported text's font as well. I just wanted to preserve italicized and bolded words, not the font. Is there not an easy way to do that?

[BennyD]

The color management unfortunately is a complete mess. Especially when you think of printing production. It starts with not having device independent color workspace and ends with inability to export spot colors properly to pdf. Not to mention the lack of overprint preview and real 1Bit-support.

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, cbordey said:

I just wanted to preserve italicized and bolded words, not the font. Is there not an easy way to do that?

When i have to import text and keep local formatting I do a search for Bold in the Find and Replace with the search set to Format >  and apply my Bold Character Style that I have made (just a simple change in the text weight from [No Change] to Bold, leaving everything else set to [No Change]). Then I do the same for the Italic text. Now you can do the apply Paragraph Style without having to use the context menu's Keep Local Formatting. If you have Bold Italic text then make a Character style with Bold and Italic set and Find and Replace that first, otherwise you'll just be using the Italic or Bold character style.

Key is to only change the Weight or Italic in the Character Style and keep everything else set to [No Change].